Noting a Centennial, and Filling In a Résumé Gap

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Oratorio Society of New York The baritone Jesse Blumberg, standing left, and the tenor John Matthew Myers performing Britten’s “War Requiem” with this chorus and its orchestra at Carnegie Hall.CreditCreditTina Fineberg for The New York Times

During his 30 years of experience as a leading choral conductor in New York, Kent Tritle has performed a wide range of repertory. But there was one major 20th-century work he had somehow never conducted: Britten’s “War Requiem.”

Mr. Tritle filled in that gap on Monday night at Carnegie Hall with a stirring performance of this profound 90-minute score with the Oratorio Society of New York, the 200-voice chorus founded in 1873, joined by the society’s orchestra. Mr. Tritle, now in his eighth season as the chorus’s music director, is also the music director and organist at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine. For this performance the society was joined by children’s choristers from the cathedral, along with three fine vocal soloists.

This year, the 100th anniversary of Britten’s birth, was a fitting time for Mr. Tritle to take on such a formidable work. Given the requiem’s genesis, every performance should seem a special occasion. That quality is written into the music.

Britten was commissioned to write a work for the dedication ceremony of Coventry Cathedral in England. That city’s 14th-century cathedral had been destroyed by German bombs in 1940. Britten decided upon a requiem, but of an unconventional and personal kind. The premiere took place on May 30, 1962.

Britten sets passages from the Latin liturgy of the requiem mass for chorus and orchestra, joined by a soprano soloist in crucial episodes. But woven into the work are bitter war poems by Wilfred Owen, who was killed as a young British officer in battle a week before the World War I armistice. Britten turns Owen’s poems into reflections on war, sung by tenor and baritone soloists accompanied by a separate chamber orchestra. In addition, the children’s choir sings segments of the liturgy accompanied by a positive organ, which lends a touch of celestial innocence to a dark, at times ironic, requiem written by a composer who was an outspoken pacifist.

Mr. Tritle captured the restless solemnity of the opening section, “Requiem aeternam.” The strings of the orchestra play a deep, heaving line, as winds and brass lace the music with piercing harmonies, over which the subdued chorus sings the Latin text almost like an intonation. Britten begins the “Dies Irae” (“Day of Wrath”) curiously, with echoes of battle music, brass fanfares and nervous choral uttering of the words. This long section of the requiem goes through fitful episodes and builds to near savagery when the full-throated choristers sing of the great quaking that will come on Judgment Day, joined by the frantic orchestra, performed here with chilling intensity.

The soprano Emalie Savoy brought gleaming richness to the solo parts in the Latin texts. The Owen poems were sung with a blend of poignancy and grim honesty by the warm lyric tenor John Matthew Myers and the expressive baritone Jesse Blumberg, with David Rosenmeyer conducting the chamber orchestra, placed stage left. The youngsters from St. John the Divine, singing from a high balcony, brought relieving moments of tenderness to the requiem, led by Malcolm Merriweather. Though this performance had three conductors, Mr. Tritle was the guiding force.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page C4 of the New York edition with the headline: Noting a Centennial, and Filling In a Résumé Gap. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe